“Always; it doubles your chances of success,” acquiesced Holmes.  “Anyhow, it gives you a choice, which makes it more interesting.  The change of her course from Londonward to Parisward proves to me either that Kidd is not satisfied with the extent of the revenge he has already taken, and wishes to ruin you gentlemen financially by turning your wives, daughters, and sisters loose on the Parisian shops, or that the pirates have themselves been overthrown by the ladies, who have decided to prolong their cruise and get some fun out of their misfortune.”

“And where else than to Paris would any one in search of pleasure go?” asked Bonaparte.

“I had more fun a few miles outside of Brussels,” said Wellington, with a sly wink at Washington.

“Oh, let up on that!” retorted Bonaparte.  “It wasn’t you beat me at Waterloo.  You couldn’t have beaten me at a plain ordinary game of old-maid with a stacked pack of cards, much less in the game of war, if you hadn’t had the elements with you.”

“Tut!” snapped Wellington.  “It was clear science laid you out, Boney.”

“Taisey-voo!” shouted the irate Corsican.  “Clear science be hanged!  Wet science was what did it.  If it hadn’t been for the rain, my little Duke, I should have been in London within a week, my grenadiers would have been camping in your Rue Peekadeely, and the Old Guard all over everywhere else.”

“You must have had a gay army, then,” laughed Caesar.  “What are French soldiers made of, that they can’t stand the wet—­unshrunk linen or flannel?”

“Bah!” observed Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders and walking a few paces away.  “You do not understand the French.  The Frenchman is not a pell-mell soldier like you Romans; he is the poet of arms; he does not go in for glory at the expense of his dignity; style, form, is dearer to him than honor, and he has no use for fighting in the wet and coming out of the fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl out of his feathers and his epaulets rusted with the damp.  There is no glory in water.  But if we had had umbrellas and mackintoshes, as every Englishman who comes to the Continent always has, and a bath-tub for everybody, then would your Waterloo have been different again, and the great democracy of Europe with a Bonaparte for emperor would have been founded for what the Americans call the keeps; and as for your little Great Britain, ha! she would have become the Blackwell’s Island of the Greater France.”

“You’re almost as funny as Punch isn’t,” drawled Wellington, with an angry gesture at Bonaparte.  “You weren’t within telephoning distance of victory all day.  We simply played with you, my boy.  It was a regular game of golf for us.  We let you keep up pretty close and win a few holes, but on the home drive we had you beaten in one stroke.  Go to, my dear Bonaparte, and stop talking about the flood.”

“It’s a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn’t a Frenchman, eh?” said Frederick the Great.  “How that rain would have fazed him if he had been!  The human race would have been wiped out.”